Tag: Evelyn Waugh

‘No one over the age of 40 – no one at any rate old enough to have experienced a literary world made up entirely of books, newspapers and reference libraries – can roam the world of the blogosphere and the online symposium without thinking that there is too much of everything – too many books, too much criticism of them, too many reviews, too many opinions, too many reading groups, too many book clubs, so many literary prizes that any vaguely competent novel comes garlanded with two or three endorsements from the judging committees, that we are drowning in a sea of data where an instant reaction is always liable to crowd out mature reflection, where anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s and the fact that the distinguished man of letters in the Wall Street Journal thinks McCarthy’s The Road is a work of genius is of no interest at all to the Amazon reviewer who awards a single star for a “lack of bite”.’

Well, there is definitely too much of that sentence, but you can see what he’s getting at.

It comes towards the end of D J Taylor’s The Prose Factory, which covers the history of English literary affairs and business from 1918 through to roughly present day.

It is full of ideas about writing, the business of writing, and by that I mean both the often neglected financial side, and also what writers were really concerned with, as opposed to what they said they were concerned with.

There is a great section on the rise of what was known as “the middle article” – light essays on literature or culture more generally in newspapers from roughly the 1920s onwards.

Such articles were still common in British newspapers when I became a junkie in the mid-1980s – or at least the broadsheets such as the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Observer and the Sunday Times.

The ‘middle article’ became the vehicle for maintaining liberal values just as, in the political sphere, the liberal tradition became threatened. Essayists as diverse as GK Chesterton or AG Gardner or JB Priestley kept this tradition going – a tradition which included the attitudes of universality tolerance and diversity of subject matter.

One essayist is described by Taylor, delightfully, as reviewing James Joyce’s Ulysses from ‘the angle of one who suspects that Ulysses has merit but can’t quite see it himself’.

This got me thinking about the blogosphere because… Well of course it did. Back when blogs became a thing, about a dozen years or so ago, I likened them to the old 18th and 19th-century pamphleteers: partisan, often puerile, and occasionally very personal.

There has, in the past few years, developed a sort of second wave of blogs in New Zealand (and no doubt elsewhere) which is less concerned with politics and more with wider issues.

There is still a highly political element, but it manages – a fair amount of the time, anyway – to avoid the juvenile and extremely boring ‘Ya Boo Lefties! ‘Ya Boo Righties!’ face pulling behaviour which became synonymous with blogging for a long time.

I think this “middle article” style seems not a bad description of the second wave.

Taylor is good – very good in fact, if very acerbic – about the sheer snobbery of many writers, with those espousing radical politics being the most snobbish of the lot.

The chapter on the 1930s – “The Pink Decade” points out that champions of working class amongst the intelligentsia seldom admitted actual members of the working class to their salons and that when they tried things seldom turned out well. There is a heartbreaking anecdote of Sid Chaplin, one of the few working-class writers,who was published being invited to George Orwell’s house and making it as far as the doorway before fleeing in terror.

He also has the occasional go at the more anti-intellectual tradition of English letters, but points out that even this, once upon a time, could draw on a background of shared cultural and intellectual heritage.

The mid-20th Century battleground between ‘modernists and traditionalists, of highbrows and lowbrows, of middle-class reactionaries, as Orwell once put it, thanking God they were not born brainy…’ was real enough, but, as he says, even conservative critics of T S Elliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ could pick up the classical allusions. That isn’t so now.

There is the ongoing problem of funding literature: ‘put an entity charged with expanding public take-up of literature in the hands of a bureaucrat, and the literature itself is all too easily lost sight of. Put it in the hands of other writers and the first casualty is likely to be a grasp of practical reality.’

There is, perhaps naturally, quite a bit on two writers who have written a lot about writers: the two friends who were often mistaken for each other, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge.

Bradbury I’ve only recently started reading although I’ve certainly been aware of him for some years – Taylor heralds as a kind of chronicler of the strange death, not so much of Liberal England as of the less definable, and much more important, set of broad liberal ideas and attitudes. Bradbury is, he says,

Bradbury is, he says

‘an elegist for an ethical code in severe danger of being swamped, a dazzling intellectual high wire act or even – to lower the bar a bit – is top-notch slapstick comedian in the Kingsley Amis mould. His real achievement, you suspect, rests on his ability to show just how formidable a force the old-style liberal humanists can be – even here in a wind and ground down world, somewhere in that endlessly contested space between the end of the Cartesian project and the beginning of the World Wide Web.’

Bradbury’s compatriot and friend David Lodge has a slightly different approach and has a lovely line about how Lodge

‘clearly isn’t averse to dressing up in the glad rags of literary theory, but on this, and other, evidence he wouldn’t want to wear it next to his skin.’

And that brings us to the issue of literary theory which haunted the study of English when I was at university in the late 80s and which was one of the main reasons I steered clear of an English major. I figured if I was going to do political theory I would rather have the real thing.

And here we go full circle, back to the snobbery of the Bloomsbury-ites and their fellow modernists. There is a thorough and by no means one-sided discussion of critic John Carey and his attack on modernism, post-modernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and literary theory generally, and Taylor does conclude that all too often 20th century literature has acted for minorities and elites to the exclusion of a large potential of readers of ordinary intelligent people who have developed, over the years, thoroughly understandable dislike of ‘culture’ and the ‘cultured’.

‘The “literary novel” … would sell far more copies and attract far more attention beyond newspaper books pages if it didn’t habitually come served with a light sauce of snootiness – if in fact, it didn’t refer to itself as a literary novel in the first place.’

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role — that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength — this role is about played out.

So spoke former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the early 1960s. Acheson was of course discussing foreign policy, and the comments came at the time the British government was edging towards joining what was then called the European Economic Community and which we now know as a European Union.

And of course we also now though British voters opted to leave Europe last month, even if we – and they – still don’t quite know what that vote means.

Acheson almost definitely did not have in mind the kind of role Dominic Sambrook outlines in The Great British Dream Factory.

That role is as a kind of middlebrow entertainer to the world. Books, true, play a sizeable part in this role.

Sandbrook is though more enamoured of film, television, and music – a chapter on the country house is more interested in the film and television examples than the literary ones.

Brideshead Revisited certainly features, but Sandbrook is more interested in the 1981 television series than the original Evelyn Waugh novel (not one of Waugh’s best efforts, in my view, but still). While P G Wodehouse and Agatha Christie get a look in, it is the global phenomenon of Downton Abbeywhich really generates Sandbrook’s enthusiasm.

Spies – he seemed rather taken with James Bond – and science fiction such as The Prisoner and Doctor Who are also star products of his Dream Factory production line.

While I’m sympathetic to Sandbrook’s rejection of some of the overrated cultural icons it covers, he tries a little too hard and too self-consciously to be a kind of middlebrow, plain-man iconoclast (he rates Elton John over David Bowie, to take one example).

His book lacks Taylor’s elegance and above all Taylor’s penetrating wit. While Taylor’s study – admittedly with a slightly narrower focus – is surefootedly deft, deep, and occasionally droll, there is a sense of clumsiness, over striving for effect, in Sandbrook’s work.

Freelance Wellington Journalist. Specialises in economics, tax, policy generally, and the ups and downs of politics. Dad, husband: farm boy by origin, Wellingtonian by adoption. This is a hobby blog. I usually post something on the weekend, but not *every* weekend.